Sinologistical Violincello has some hard-hitting translation observations and questions up this morning regarding China’s GDP:

the phrase “老二 / lao er” is getting thrown around as China looks to move firmly into the number 2 slot globally, making it sound as if the world order were some kind of Confucian family of older brothers jostling for respect.

and then, translating snide BBS comments about the pointlessness of hyping GDP:

没意思，太没意思了！都炒糊了，人均呢？虎年我们要的是虎威，不要炒威！ — Uninteresting, totally meaningless! It’s all just fried paste. Per capita income? In the year of the tiger, we need the tiger’s power; what we don’t need is fried power? [Note: this is one of the tricky things about translating BBS comments: is the really idiomatic language above indicative of a new nation-wide slang word, or is this cat local and/or high on Red Bull and feeling creative? That’s why there’s no substitute for being in China…But if anyone can dissertate on the meaning of 炒糊, 炒威 or just plain 炒威, please don’t hesitate to comment on this post.]

If you want to supplement your GDP discussions with some visual language, Continue…

Reading this pitch-perfect account of prescriptivist and descriptivist collision…

When my History of the English Language professor observed that the distinction between lay and lie was being lost among younger speakers (good luck asking a twenty-year-old to run the paradigms), I had the poor enough judgment to share this insight with Grandmother. Since I could never keep straight what was laying and who was lying, this was a lesson that resonated with me. I might as well have told her that going out in public without a bra had become the vogue. (h/t Literal-Minded)

… made me recollect a recent conversation in which I was trying to find out the word for saturated fat. I had looked up the nutritional term for fat and gotten 脂肪 but wasn’t sure about saturated fat. Since Grandma’s a medical doctor, why not ask her? Continue…

A quiz:
Name the language used in the following phrase.

贼呃是韵，次一幕里希是以克。

Bonus points if you can catch the meaning.

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Per previous post that Google Buzz would soon be blocked in China…

On a serious note, here’s what legal blogger Don Cruse says about the state of Buzz privacy, making a different China connection:

So, a few days ago your email address book and list of recipients was private information. It would have been downright scandalous if someone had broken into Google and stolen it — even if just for a few dozen targeted accounts of Chinese dissidents. But today, Google has used that same information to seed a new social network that by default makes these links publicly searchable? Wow.

If you’re paranoid and pseudonymous online (hey, don’t point fingers) you should go immediately to his post to learn how hard Buzz makes it to keep your information private. Thumbs down for Google on this one.

On a completely cynical note: how long before someone argues that Buzz is Google’s compromise for staying in country: “We’ll just have everyone out their own circle of friends!”

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FYI: NYT article on privacy issues

It’s duǎnxìn (短信 = text msg) season in China, with its tradition of sending new year’s greetings to everyone in your address book. The nice thing about the coming year of the tiger (虎 = hǔ) is that, repeated, the syllable becomes a word in its own right (tiger-tiger?) that the ABC Dictionary glosses as “energetic; vigorous”. Thus you might end up with

给您虎虎的祝福，虎虎的甜蜜，虎虎的运气，虎虎的健康，虎虎的快乐，虎虎的心情，虎虎的顺利，虎虎的幸福，虎虎的人生！×××祝您虎年快乐

Wishing you tiger-tiger blessings, tiger-tiger treats, tiger-tiger luck, tiger-tiger health… [get the picture?]

Not your style? Laowai Chinese offers some simpler texting options.

And for all of you I won’t get to text tonight: Happy year of the tiger! 虎年快乐！(Hǔnián kuài lè)

I don’t want it to be right but it probably is: ULN at chinayouren predicts Google Buzz will be harmonized and fast, the only question being how quickly.

Personally, I had to invoke my own personal Buzz firewall the first day the service appeared in my gmail. As I squandered precious brain time on update-after-amusing-update, I suddenly realized the Buzz Unread count was growing faster than I could read, let alone actually get other work done. So I turned it off — i.e. dug deep into gmail options and eliminated the Buzz category from my sidebar.

Still, I’d rather not see it blocked, since I agree that has ominous implications for gmail itself.

Language connection? Oh, that’s part of ULN’s predictions in Step 6 of the Google Buzz doom sequence:

More than 50% of the words on GBuzz worldwide are in mandarin characters, and about 10% of them are some form of 妈/逼 word construction (mother /cunt). Continue…

Today I went to my favourite neighbourhood bookstore on a quest for some early works of Y.R. Chao. While I didn’t find what I was looking for I did spend some time with Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary. It was the 1960 edition but included the preface from the 1943 edition. Excerpt below.

With books no longer coming from the Far East, the need for Chinese dictionaries in this country has grown from chronic to acute. To answer the immediate demands of American students, the Harvard-Yenching Institute has undertaken to revise and reprint two practical dictionaries, (1) C H Fenn’s Pocket Dictionary, which appeared in November 1942, and (2) the present Chinese-English Dictionary by R.H. Mathews, both photolithographed reproductions.

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I’ve always wanted to fake people out like this:

(We’ve all got monolingual friends, and some of those might not know that we’re bilingual.)

At a gathering of friends who are monolingual and don’t know you can speak Chinese, announce that you can speak Chinese fluently.  It’s best if you’re with a crowd that wouldn’t suspect that you could do such a thing.

Then say something that to an English speaking monolingual person sounds like fake Chinese, but to a Chinese person sounds perfectly reasonable.  My best attempt (in a pseudo-Beijing-Opera voice):

经常上长城！ (jīngcháng shàng chángchéng, Go to the Great Wall often!

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What? That’s not what comes to mind as the opposite of “pejorative term”?

Me neither. The ABC dictionary also offers “commendatory term” as an alternative to “meliorative word” in its definition of bāoyìcí (褒义词). But as far as my own English lexical organization goes, the hard fact is that there’s no standard opposite to “pejorative term.”

Mandarin is another story. For those of middle age persuasion, bāoyìcí (also pronounced bǎoyìcí) is the no-hesitating opposite of biǎnyìcí, which means “pejorative term.” It’s an opposition as perfectly natural as rough against smooth, thick against thin.

I found that odd, probably just because English seems much more comfortable with just the pejorative side. So I went up a generation in wisdom, as there are plenty of this demographic around the house for tomorrow’s new year’s eve celebrations.

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This is part two of a series. Part one is available here.

In my last post I went over a number of contractions for which characters have been encoded into Unicode as well as discussing some of the inherent limitations in encoding methods. In this post, I’ll be explaining why this matters.

The technical limitations imposed by having a finite number of glyphs aren’t something that affects only the writing of topolects. It’s also an issue for the development of modern Mandarin as the creation of new terminology for new concepts is likely to be severely limited in the future by the lack of flexibility in the written language. Of course, this is a limitation that we may never be aware of in future years, much like one cannot truly be aware of other paths one’s life may have taken. And granted, there are thousands upon thousands of characters that we’ll never see outside of character tables or the 康熙字典, but it’s still a major limitation as far as being Mandarin is a living language.

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